XVII Congress of the Brazilian Studies Association

Recasting Brazilian and World Literature Perspectives I

Session Submission Type: Complete Panel

Abstract

This panel engages world literature in its many facets—as a theory, a methodological approach, and as a process of world creation and contestation. We aim to reassess Brazilian literature within this comprehensive framework. The Brazilian critical tradition has a long history of grappling with the influence and pressures exerted by global literature, particularly from Europe, on the formation of its national literary identity. Diverse scholars, including Antonio Candido, Roberto Schwarz, and Silviano Santiago, have demonstrated how Brazilian writers have, over the centuries, struck back, deviating from and re-writing inherited models. Questioning notions of indebtedness, imitation, and replication, these critics have emphasized both the profound unevenness of international exchanges and the world-making potential of cross-cultural interactions and literary circulations. In continuation of these debates, we pose the following questions: How does a global literary imagination emerge within dynamics of circulation and exchange? How does the lens of world literature transform our understanding and interpretation of literature beyond national boundaries? How do local contexts speak to world designs? What do new trajectories of literary circulation reveal about our understanding of the world and about literature? What do perspectives from diverse and often marginalized communities bring to bear on both national and international constructs? How world literature manifests also as literary world creation?

Hybrid session. Link: https://sdsu.zoom.us/s/81195446807

Sub Unit

• XVII Congress of the Brazilian Studies Association

Individual Presentations

• Infectious World-Building: Contagion and Collaboration in Corpos Secos (2020) - Chloe Hill, University of North Carolina - Chapel Hill

• Witchcraft Laws and Archives of Erasure - Ana Paulina Lee, Columbia University

• Black Diaspora, Transnational Quilombo: The Black Geography of Beatriz Nascimento in Ôrí and Rosana Paulino in The Sewing of Memory - Ana Claudia Dos Santos Sao Bernardo, Providence College

• Ailton Krenak and the Critique of Monoculture in Indigenous Thinking in Brazil - Jamille Pinheiro Dias, University of London

• Prize Culture and the Economy of Prestige in Brazilian Literature - Krista Brune, Pennsylvania State University

Chair

• Krista Brune, Pennsylvania State University

Session Organizer

• Krista Brune, Pennsylvania State University